User:PDesenne

From Open Annotation Collaboration

Phil Desenne

Academic Technologies Senior Product Manager

Academic Technology Group, Harvard University

Use Case: Collaborative Annotation Tool & Common Collaborative Media Annotation Framework

Our group is involved in the development of several collaborative annotation tools for Harvard University's learning management system (LMS). The tools are available as web modules to all course websites – undergraduate and graduate – served through our LMS. We offer text, image, audio and video annotation tools that are used across all disciplines (humanities, science and social sciences). These are primarily pedagogical tools, used by faculty, instructors, teaching assistants and students, to emphasize close reading, detailed analysis, critiques and collaborative discussion of online digital content related to the course.

The annotation features of our currently deployed LMS tool versions are very basic – annotations are entered using simple text – with no interoperable or cross-referencing capabilities. For our next development phase we are planning to implement enhancements that would allow media rich annotations and cross-referencing annotations between media. Our intension is to incorporate annotation standards enabling interoperability and integrating common data exchange formats that would permit our tools to interface with other annotations tools, data services, bibliographical references, media archives, etc. We strongly believe that RDF is the right approach and one of the models that we are very interested in adopting is the OAC data model and ontology for describing the annotations.

Parallel to the development of annotation tools for our LMS we are also leading a cross-institutional initiative, called the Common Collaborative Media Annotation Framework, to encourage development of collaborative media annotation tools using standards such as the ones described by OAC – or recommend the use of existing ones – and to promote scholarly annotations within pedagogical and research environments through online reference material, testimonials from scholars and real use-case examples. The framework will offer blueprint models for scholarly media annotation clients that will support text, image – 2D and 3D –, video, audio, map and spatial – geospatial and virtual space – annotations.